Engineer's Daughter

notes from the weekend

• Regina Morones is incandescent as the title character in Shotgun Players' Yerma, adapted from the Lorca play and directed by Katja Rivera. On the surface the story is about one woman's too-consuming desire for a baby, but the viewer can also extrapolate outward to conundrums women have faced through the ages and to Lorca's own struggles with his sexuality. Risky, powerful work.
• The new exhibition at Letterform Archive, Subscription to Mischief, is absolutely superb, viewing graffiti through the lens of the '90s zines that both documented it and helped to legitimize it as an art form. I'm always blown away by Letterform's meticulously researched wall texts, and though the East Coast is strongly represented there are many local legends in the show besides.
• Catharine Clark recently extended its gallery space into the rooms next door, and the Jen Bervin exhibition that is there right now is an excellent inaugural use of the space. The centerpiece of the show is the Mississippi River, visualized by the artist in hand-sewn sequins and positioned so that it spills down one entire wall and winds its way across the ceiling, but Bervin's other conceptual work (test tubes containing the ashes of burned journals, "poems" of silver thread) is also quite lovely.

edgar müller's 3d street art

Artist Edgar Müller specializes in some crazy-impressive pavement trompe l'oeil.  If you stand at the right spot near one of his paintings it might suddenly seem as if the earth has opened up at your feet or that you are in danger of a sneaky sidewalk shark attack, but it's naught but one of Müller's fabricated catastrophes.  See more of his work on his site at the link above or in the gallery here.

new york street artist poster boy: on the wall

As culture jams go, my favorites have always been the ones that make bold alterations to existing advertisements and billboards, taking the piss out of consumerism and Madison Avenue alike.  New York street artist Poster Boy has been brilliantly and anonymously tweaking subway ads for about a year now with little more than a razor and a wicked sense of humor.  And, unlike Banksy, he gives in-person interviews.  Ben Walters talked to him for the Guardian:

Witty and playful as it is, there's no missing the political edge of Poster Boy's work, rooted in indignation at what he calls "this mass advertising always attacking people. They don't have a choice: they're riding the subway, they already paid their two dollars. Why the fuck should they be force-fed this stuff?" As well as consumerism, his pieces have targeted racism, gentrification, gender inequality, US immigration and foreign policy (for Transporter read "Deported"; for Iron Man, read "Iran = Nam") and, recently, Israeli action in Gaza.

To see some examples of Poster Boy's adbusting, click through to the gallery here or check out his Flickr stream.  I love the ones where he pixelates posters using the grids formed by the subway tile as a sort of graph paper, and I also have to appreciate a street artist who can punnily reference Rauschenberg.  I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for his work when I'm in New York later this spring, that's for sure.